RIP Psystar?? A judge ruled in a summary judgment that Psystar infringed on Apple's copyrights and violated the DCMA, in building Mac clones. One of these clones is pictured here, a $599 clone here that comes packed with a 3.33 GHz Intel processor, a GeForce 9600GSO, iWork, and iLife (all at approximately half the price of a comparable setup from Apple). (Source: Psystar)

A summary judgment goes very badly for Psystar

Apple has been trying to crush
Psystar for over
a year now. After all, the persistent company has been
selling OS X clones at cheaper prices than Apple's own designs.
In doing so, it is undermining Apple's closed box model of using
software to justify hardware price markups. More recently, the
company threw more dirt in Apple's face, releasing
a tool to help customers freely install OS X on any machine,
something Apple has long fought against.

However, Apple has at
last gained the upper hand over Psystar, delivering it a potentially
fatal blow in court. In a summary
judgment delivered on November 13 in a San Francisco court, Judge
William Alsup ruled that Psystar infringed on Apple's copyrights to
put OS X on the unauthorized computers it built and sold. He
also ruled that Psystar violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
by circumventing Apple's software protections that block its software
from being installed on third-party hardware.

Reads the
ruling, "Psystar infringed Apple's exclusive right to create
derivative works of Mac OS X. Specifically, it made three
modifications: (1) replacing the Mac OS X bootloader with a different
bootloader to enable an unauthorized copy of Mac OS X to run on
Psystar's computers; (2) disabling and removing Apple kernel
extension files; and (3) adding non-Apple kernel
extensions."

Psystar, which is claiming Apple is misusing
its copyrights, was also denied its own request for summary
judgment. The company was told that it was perfectly legal for
Apple to use its EULA to control what platforms its own software is
allowed on.

A second hearing is scheduled for December 14 and
an official trial will start January 2010. The summary
judgement does deal a major blow to Psystar as it sets the mood for
the trial, and may lead to Apple gaining a restraining order against
Psystar's sales. As Psystar already went bankrupt once, this
could spell doom for the young company.

The ruling also is a
pleasing victory for Apple as it validates its argument that it
installing OS X on forbidden hardware is a violation of the DMCA.
And as California, unlike most states, requires evidence to be
presented before summary judgment is determined, the ruling could be
viewed as more considered or binding. This could open the door
to Apple being able to crack down harder on individual Hackintosh
makers.

Apple recently looked to stomp out the
Hackintosh community by killing
support for the Intel Atom processor, effectively making its Snow
Leopard and Leopard unable to be installed on netbooks.
However, despite Apple's determined efforts it can't seem to stop
fans of its operating system from freely installing OS X on a variety
of systems.